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If we assume video games are a form of art then “Street Fighter II: The World Warrior” would be one of those rare masterpieces created through the usage of either unparalleled genius or sheer luck, or more probably a mixture of both.

It had many revolutionary features. For the first time, a fighting game had asymmetrical gameplay. There were seven different playable characters, and each of these characters had entirely different move sets. The player characters were gigantic in size. Each of them had a dedicated arena with lots of background animation and parallax scrolling.

But the most unbelievable feature was called “hadooken”.  It was unbelievable even for me back in 1992. For the uninitiated, hadooken is a fairly well known strike in karate or kung fu. The practitioner breathes in, pulls his hands towards his body, and channels his chi from the main five chakras towards his palms. When done correctly this should already form a white fireball in the fighter’s hand. It is then possible to shoot this fireball towards the object you desire to annihilate. It’s a very hard maneuver to pull. The training is only given in the Himalayas. Don’t try it at home.

It wasn’t the fact that a kung fu practitioner can shoot a fireball from his hands or the fact that the aforementioned fireball is white which bothered me. The part of my traumatic childhood I had spent in cheap cinemas watching horrible Chinese or Hong Kong action movies taught me that when kung fu is in the equation anything is possible. No, the thing that amazed me was how you were supposed to do the hadooken move in the game.

See, back then there were only eight things you could do with a joystick. The game instantly responded to whatever move you did with the controller. Hadooken, on the other hand, required you do make a quick quarter circle and then push a button. This was entirely illogical and against the very working principle of the device called joystick.

Yet it worked.

This was the beginning of everything. There you had the god of fighting games. Every single fighting game made after Street Fighter II took it as a template and tried to improve on it. Experts would agree that, in the 17 or so years which followed, not even the producers of Street Fighter II itself could make a better game.  People tried and failed. That’s probably because the evolutionary tree of fighting games grew towards the wrong sun. It’s a classic example of Socrates’ observation of artists. Even the artists themselves don’t know what makes  their creations so marvelous.

No, the switch from 2D to 3D doesn’t help. Most 3D fighting games still play on a 2D plane anyway. The problem is a bit more complicated.

Any game designer worth his salt would say that the ultimate goal when designing a game is making it easy to learn and hard to master. What does this mean?

Every game has an objective and a set of rules defining how the player can legally reach that objective. The rules mostly define the core of the game. The game of soccer may require superior agility, strength and endurance, but without knowing the rules you cannot even start playing the game. With the knowledge of the rules but lack of the required traits, you can still play soccer, even if you’d be playing it very badly.

Every game is a test, but it’s not supposed to be a test of your rules knowledge. Whatever it is that the game is designed to test, rules are not part of the test and therefore not a part of the game. For two reasons it is best to have simple rules which can easily be learned by the players.

A good example of a game with simple rules would be the game of Chess. For the uninitiated, Chess is a turn based, tactics game played on a field made of tiles, much like Final Fantasy Tactics. Yet compared to Final Fantasy Tactics, its rule set is pretty simple. There are only 6 different units and one rather bland map, no resource management, no base building, no unit advancement, no skill points, no spells, no alternative attacks, no reinforcements, no random events, no weather conditions, no terrain obstacles or elevation, no custom mission objectives and no party building. On top of that, the combat resolution is rather minimalistic: Attacker wins.

The obvious advantage of this is the fact that even a 7 year old can learn the rules of Chess in quite a short time and start enjoying the game. So Chess isn’t intimidating people with its 1000 page, 20 kg manual. All the rules of chess can be explained on one page.

This doesn’t mean that chess is a shallow game. In fact, it’s one of the deeper games in the history of humanity. And if you’re playing it with an experienced opponent, the game itself is everything but simple. There is a difference between a game being difficult and a game being difficult to play.  Which brings us to our second point.

It is a widely known mathematical fact that complicated rules usually result in simple systems while simple rules counter-intuitively tend to yield complex systems.

In our example, Chess is a game with very simple rules. But the number of possible and viable moves available to a player each turn is huge, and therefore the number of possible games is staggeringly high. This is the reason why people are still playing it. The game has incredible replay value and depth, even with its relatively simple rules.

This is not a coincidental trait. Compared to Chess the game of Wei-Qin (known more widely as Go) is much more simple when it comes to rules. The rules “set” of Go consists of only one main rule and a supplemental rule considering a special circumstance which can occur when using the first rule. And that’s it. Yet the number of possible Go games is so high that Chess by comparison seems like a very shallow game.

Exactly this was the genius behind “Street Fighter II”.  Despite its six different attack buttons and one stick, everything was clear and simple for each character. Each button was labeled. There usually were only stick and button combinations and these almost always resulted in an expected action from the fighter on screen. Pulling the stick down and pressing medium kick would do exactly what you expect: A low, medium powered kick. Push the stick up for a medium powered kick in the air.

Virtua Fighter, widely known as the best fighting game today, is also believed to be extremely deep. Each character has an amazing number of moves which can be executed by pressing certain buttons in quick succession. The buttons most of the time have little to no relation to the move executed. The mechanic is called Dial-a-combo. It was popularized by the Tekken series and used by every single fighting game released in this century with different results. Some, like Tekken, used a system which gave the player a false feeling of these button presses being relevant to the moves. Others, like the Mortal Kombat series, simply required you to enter a combination very fast to execute the move.

The move itself, being a part of the game’s rules,  becomes a challenge while what should matter is using that move at the correct moment in a correct way. This makes the game complicated to play but not necessarily complicated.

The interface is there to translate the player’s thoughts to the language the game understands so that the game can obey the player. What these developers call “deep combo system” is  nothing more than a bad interface. You could bind one hand of the player to his back and I’m sure the combos would be even more complicated.

In “Street Fighter II”, each character only had around 3 special moves. And by special move I mean moves which can be executed by complex controller input. A newcomer could easily start playing the game in a few minutes. These special moves were a bonus, an extra for those who discovered them.

What other fighting games have done wrong is making the special moves the entire focus of the game. Consequently only insane people who read trough pages of moves lists and memorize all the combinations can truly play these games. For the rest the games are made button mash friendly. Poor normal people can press random buttons very quickly and hope their fighter will do something relevant.

It’s a shame that since 1992 there really wasn’t any revolution in the genre. We’re still using the rule set from Street Fighter II, in the right or wrong way.

Long ago I gave up waiting for a new exciting mechanic in fighting games. Now my only hope is Street Fighter IV, which I hope will be going bad to the roots of fighting games for normal people, using the rules set by its predecessor, but this time in the right way.

I remember pre-ordering “Bioshock” as soon as I could. “System Shock II” was one of my favorite games. It was a rare and weird game adding the RPG sauce into the first person shooter dish. It also used clever ideas to overcome visual shortcomings. The result was one of the most effective survival horror games ever created. “Bioshock, its normal shaded, Unreal 3.0 powered spiritual successor could only be better” I thought, not remembering the fact that whenever I thought, it always got me in trouble.

In theory “Bioshock” is great. Instead of the sci-fi story of “System Shock 2”, it has a story which takes place in the past, in 1960. It features realistic physics simulation, allowing you to exploit the conductivity of water, or to simply throw things at enemies. Unlike “System Shock 2” it has no weapon durability stat or no character classes. The player is able to make use of every single action in the game at any time giving him a much wider palette of choices. And isn’t that the whole point of a non linear story? Hell, the game has three possible endings you can reach depending on the moral choices you make. Like “Silent Hill 2” I thought. In theory it is great.

Silly me. Being the Pisces I am, it is hard to tear myself from the land of dreams and remember the horrifying difference between theory and practice.

In practice the story of Bioshock is–shall we say–patchy, in politest terms.

We follow the exploits of one Jack, a passenger on a non-descript airplane, which suddenly decides to fall into the ocean. Being the sole survivor of the accident, our hero discovers a light house in the middle of the ocean and naturally swims for it. It appears there is a huge underwater city underneath that light house. This underground city was constructed by an idealist maniac called Ryan. In order to create a perfect society Ryan gathered all the most brilliant but misunderstood people in the world and made them part of his project. But as legions of B Movies taught us: “You can’t contain super science.” Things have gone horribly wrong in a horribly short time. Now Jack is trapped in this nightmare and the only way out seems to be through following the instructions of a kindred soul, one Atlas, who also wants to get out.

Of course things are never that simple. There are at least two big plot twists and several homicidal crew members approaching you with murderous intent, not to mention an abundance of fetch quests. The unnerving part for someone who remembers “System Shock 2” is that underneath all the polish very few things have changed.

The template and the general narrative flow of both games are astonishingly similar. Our hero whose body was modified by nanomachines or their 20th century equivalent genetics (frankly, I think for 1960, nuclear radiation would be more appropriate due to its well known Spiderman producing properties) finds himself in an isolated environment in which something has gone horribly wrong. He has only one ally with whom he only has radio contact. Of course it turns out in the end that this ally is the main villain. Everyone else is gone zombie. Those who have not are about to, or else they will attack our hero for no logical reason at all. On top of that, the entire security system (the incredible high tech security of the 60s) is against him and the whole location will soon be destroyed, so he’d better get out quickly.

Besides this template, the method of conveying the story is similar too. We listen to many voice recordings and/or read through endless paragraphs of diaries. It seems both in the future and past everyone loves keeping diaries. Direct interaction between characters is mostly restricted to beating the shit out of crazy inhabitants of the place. Furthermore we see reenactments of previous events in form of ghostly apparitions acting out the event. This does seem a bit too similar for two entirely stories taking place in entirely different settings.

The whole thing may be due to the fact that according to Ken Levine, game play always comes first; story presumably second, or maybe last. He says that during the development, the story of “Bioshock” changed entirely, several times. It is clear that Levine wanted to make a new “System Shock” game. Sadly “System Shock” belongs to Electronic Arts. So he did the next best thing. He made a new “System Shock” which is not really “System Shock”. The result is like trying to fit a star shaped block into a circle shaped hole. It doesn’t work. So Levine takes his hammer and pounds on the story until it fits.

The main difference between the two stories is that in “Bioshock” the already shaky suspension of disbelief goes out of the window. One of the unique elements of “System Shock 2” was that the villain was also the setting. SHODAN, the antagonist, was an AI with a God complex and she controlled every single part of the brightly lit and sterile looking environment you had to walk around. She was everywhere, watching your every move. In “Bioshock”, though, the villain is pretty much human. The environment is still against you, but there is no concrete reason for that.

We also have all the elements from System Shock’s game play, without any rational explanation: Automatic sentry turrets, security cameras, and killer robots, all of which you can hack. Remember it’s still the ‘60s. We know that Ryan hired rather clever people and brilliant scientists for his utopia project, but the audience has no idea as to how these contraptions work. We get a vague explanation about some miracle element and advanced genetics, but that’s about it. Mind you, this is not like “Fallout”, where the microchip is a lamp based circuit. “Fallout” was a story taking place in the future, seen through 1950s style goggles. Conceptually, that was a brilliant idea. But “Bioshock” is still in the ‘60s. Levine expects his audience to accept that in mere 4 or 5 years incredible advances were made in all fields of science but he still doesn’t explain how security cameras using 35mm films ended up with that incredible face recognition software so that they can instantly recognize you as foe and lock onto you. What can I say? As a PhD student in Cinema, I DO want their film development lab.

With the believability of the setting murdered, all you have is the art deco style environments and the story; of which, frankly, there isn’t much. The game assumes that the main hero will either be a power hungry psychopath or an angel clad in human skin.

Even without prior “System Shock 2” knowledge, the twists and turns of the story are rather obvious. There is next to no character development, no conflicts to resolve, nothing. All you have is recountings of previous events and a final twist. And what a twist that is.

The “Would you kindly” twist is, I must admit, a very good one. It reveals that the choices and the actions of our protagonist weren’t really his own. This not only makes sense, but also patches up many holes in the narrative and the irrationality of the protagonist’s actions. However, it could have been much more.

The main plot twist has further implications just like the plot twist in “Haze” does. The protagonist doesn’t really have a choice. He does what he’s been told, much like a character in a video game, which Bioshock happens to be. This could have been a great narrative on the nature of choice and the alternative lives we live in video games. Or it could have been something entirely different. A moderately talented author would have taken this concept and turned it into gold.

What you end up with in “Bioshock”, however, is a classic example of a story consisting only of a nice twist. Even with the twist, there are a hundred holes. How did they send Jack out? How did he live out there? How did Fontaine communicate with him? What kind of stupid plan is crashing the plane? What if Jack didn’t survive (and he almost does drown)?

And why would anyone surviving a plane crash, upon finding a huge syringe filled with a suspicious blue fluid, be instantly overwhelmed by the desire to stick it into his arm? (There is no “would you kindly” dialog there.)

It seems Levine, like most so called intellectual game designers, hates cinematic cut scenes and says the story should be conveyed through game play, without ever taking control from the player. But if this means I’ll have to listen to hours of voice recordings and read endless lines of text, I’d much rather read a proper book or listen to a radio play.

Levine may or may not be right. Game play may or may not be king. But surely the narrative in “Bioshock” doesn’t hold any noble titles, even if it does look quite enlightened compared to other games.

I spent most of last week playing “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots”. This is because I was bedridden and a game which is accused of having extremely long cinematics by almost all reviewers seemed to be a good game to play (or watch) while I was sick.

There are many things to be said about the game, and many people have already said those things. This is mainly because Metal Gear Solid as a series is quite similar to a train wreck involving a Japanese bullet train, a vintage European steam locomotive, five cars, three helicopters, a truck full of trinitroglycerin, and a bike carrying an unspecified number of ostrich eggs in its front and rear baskets. That is to say it’s most certainly awful, but awful in a very interesting way so that the viewers are usually unable to divert their gaze from the grotesque spectacle. There are many, many things to say.

One of the worst problems with the series, however, is the illness I’d like to call “twist-mania”. Sadly this illness is not unique to Metal Gear series. It’s a horrific disease shared by many video games and by movies made by M. Night Shyamalan.

What is a twist?

A twist is a plot device which usually comes in form of previously unrevealed and unexpected information. This information ideally changes the audience’s understanding of the narrative, the characters or ideally both. A famous example would be Darth Vader’s announcement at the end of Empire Strikes Back. We learn that the antagonist is in fact the protagonist’s father. Therefore suddenly our understanding of the narrative changes, our theories about the possible resolution of the story need revising and many things that previously didn’t make sense suddenly do. In short, it is a surprise; something that catches the audience off guard.

When it’s done well it’s a very nice thing. It can motivate the viewer to go through the narrative once more. It makes the audience go “Wow, I never expected that.” And because it’s usually one of the most memorable parts of a story, people will keep on talking about it. Therefore many inexperienced authors think that the most important part of a story is the twist.

It isn’t. It’s just one of the many devices the author has at his disposal to tell a story.

If we think of the narrative as a multi-layered cake, the twist would be the secret, small, cherry sauce disc hidden in the middle. You will be pleasantly surprised upon reaching it. You will enjoy its taste and tell your friends about it. However if the cake itself tastes awful, no amount of cherry sauce will save it.

The very definition of a story requires that you as a writer have something to say, something to tell. Building a story around a twist is a very risky thing. In the process you might accidentally end up with something good to tell. But more often than not you will make the story a vessel for the twist. And more often than not this results in no story at all, because without the twist, the story becomes meaningless.

A simple method to verify the presence of an interesting story would be to remove the twists from the narrative and reading it again. If the story is still worth reading, then you can rest easy knowing that you have written a good story.

There is a pretty good twist at the end of the movie “Fight Club”. It’s a twist which affects the narrative in far more ways than Luke Skywalker’s parental issues. We learn that one of the main antagonists of the story does not exist at all. But even if you remove this twist, the story remains interesting enough. I have seen people saying that “Fight Club” was like two movies in one and they would have liked both of those movies separately too.

On the other hand, “Sixth Sense” is pretty much written exclusively for the final twist. Bruce Willis is actually dead. If this information is known to you from the start of the movie, the story becomes very boring and not really worth watching, while “Fight Club” would still be an interesting movie with its main twist known.

By now everyone in the gaming community is probably aware of the “Would you kindly?” twist in Bioshock. For everyone who played “System Shock 2” I guess the whole “Bioshock” experience in terms of storytelling was like a prolonged déjà vu. Apart from all the things we expected to happen, does the “would you kindly?” twist really save the horribly patchy storyline? Does anything even remotely make sense? Wouldn’t it be better if the designers focused on the cohesion of the story itself, instead of the -oh so shocking- twist ending?

In the case of “Metal Gear Solid”, things are even worse. If you remove the twists from “Metal Gear” series, you won’t end up with a bad story. Instead you will most probably end up with nothing at all. That’s because Mr. Kojima, like many video game authors, constructed his story entirely out of twists. From the famous “I’m your father!” to the infamous “None of this was actually real!” he uses every single twist in the book. This may sound ingenious to some of you; building an entire story out of twists. But then you’re missing the point.

The point is that the twist is a surprise. Part of the definition of surprise is that you don’t even know it’s coming. When you start bombarding the audience with surprises they will soon start to expect them. And surprising someone who’s expecting a surprise is much like killing a dead person.

So probably the biggest problem of “Metal Gear Solid 4″ is Hideo Kojima, its designer, who happens not to be a writer. Most video game designers naturally don’t know the first thing about writing a story. There is no reason they should.

So the moral of the story is that people should stick to doing things they are good at. When it’s a story you want told, perhaps it would have been a good idea to let it done by a storyteller.

There is no such thing as an RPG. Really. It might be a surprise to the legions of RPG fans around the world, but what can I say? I’m sorry. I share your pain.

Of course I am not talking about that nerdy table top game, which these computer games are trying unsuccessfully to emulate. There is also the Rocket Propelled Grenade, which as we all know, is a sort of device that allows you to jump up to great heights, ignoring a significant amount of gravity, providing you are healthy enough. I am not talking about that either. At least not directly.

I am talking about RPGs as video games. The sort of game in which you kill dramatis personae, get their stuff, level up, and kill even more powerful dramatis personae or failing that exterminate the wild life until you can. Apparently I am talking about those, since I understand this is the definition of RPG if you look at things through video game style goggles.

Originally, RPG as a table top game is a pretty interesting cooperative affair which pretends to be competitive sometimes. There are two asymmetrical teams: One team is made up of several players, the other usually has only one person in it: The Game Master or shortly GM. Players try to overcome the challenges presented to them by the GM. However, rather than being the goal of the game, this is just a tool to achieve the objective, the objective being telling a story interactively.

It’s a bit akin to musical duels by folk musicians or a poetry showdown. It requires creativity from both sides. What the GM is doing is creating conflicts without being able to determine how the main characters would respond to or resolve them. The main characters, created and played by players, in return, resolve the conflict in their own way, creating for the GM a new problem about the story. This process of back and forth slowly builds a story in a very unique and organic kind of way. It’s a very peaceful, new, hippie game. No wonder it was invented at the beginning of the 70s.

When it works well, it is a fascinating process. However, most of the time it doesn’t work well. The main reason for this is that the game, due to its nature, requires creative and intelligent people on both teams. This is a prerequisite not easily fulfilled in any kind of social activity.

Computers are stupid. They may act as if they were clever, but they are not. The term Artificial Intelligence is misleading. There is no intelligence involved there. It is just a bunch of scripts trying to give the impression of being intelligent. The computer can neither play an RPG with you nor assist you in playing an RPG with other people, because to do that, you’d need a computer you can code with your thoughts alone, or failing that, a real AI. Some kind of artificial device which is capable of thinking creatively. I’m not saying this can never be done. I just think there is still some time until we invent Skynet.

As computer games, RPGs are basically trying to do the same thing: Telling a story with the help of the players. But because we aren’t dealing with an intelligent person in real time, the scope is limited to pre-programmed stuff. You end up playing a computer game and being told a story you cannot really influence much. Pretty much all computer games fall into this category.

It doesn’t matter how dumb the story is. There is no difference between Eye of the Beholder from Westwood and Project X from Team 17 in that regard. In the former you have descent into the earth to find a bad guy ruling an army of fanatics and in the latter your task is—and I am quoting from the game box—“to penetrate deep into the planet Ryxx, destroy the aliens’ base, and escape with your ship intact.” Both games let you choose from a variety of classes with different abilities for your on screen alter ego. In both games enemies killed by you drop some kind of power ups in form of blue bubbles or points. In both games you have the option to arm yourself differently depending on your play style. One game is called RPG, the other is called shoot’em up. In both games you play the role of a character.

In regards to video games, an RPG is similar to the games we used to call Movie Games in the past. That is saying that RPG is not a genre but rather an amalgam of genres, a series of different games connected to form a cohesive whole in order to tell a story. The difference between classic games like Pool of the Radiance and Pirates! is that one of them tries to or claims to be like a table top RPG game, and the other doesn’t.

Of course today many complex games are made up of a variety of game mechanics. But these game mechanics themselves are smaller games. A typical RPG makes use of the point and click adventure’s dialog system for character interaction, an experience based power up system based on table top RPGs, item based puzzles of—again—adventure games, and some sort of other system to resolve the combat.

Naturally one of the most important and relatively easy to develop parts of those games are combat. It is much harder to make a realistic dialog tree or a game which would invent random story elements based on the pacing, the characters and past player choices etc. Therefore in most RPGs, combat is the defining and dominating aspect.

Essentially most of Fallout is a tactical combat game not that much different from X-Com. The Elder Scrolls series is a variation of the first person shooter. Diablo is a beat’em up fundamentally not much different from Final Fight. Sure there are other game mechanics there to make them more complicated, more cerebral or more storytelling-friendly if you will, but at heart all these games are called RPGs just because there are experience points and some exploration are involved.

The problem here is that most western developers don’t really get that there is no such genre as RPG. They are blindly flailing around trying to do what table top RPGs are doing. In contrast, the eastern developers, who probably have seen the RPG genre for the first time as a video game, are busy perfecting the twisted vision they got from western developers.

There is no RPG. The sooner you realize that, the cleaner your design will be. It is stupid to praise Bioware for its innovative and original “action combat system” on Mass Effect. It will make you sound like a moron and will twist your vision of design. Because that “action combat system” is neither innovative nor original. The shocking reality is that Mass Effect is a third person shooter. And that’s it. Plain and simple.

In their wisdom, Bioware decided they have made enough real time strategy games now and they should switch you another mechanic for combat. Because as you can easily realize the dominant mechanic of Infinity Engine games such as Baldur’s Gate was real time strategy, as it was beat’em up with Jade Empire. Now it’s third person shooter for Mass Effect.

It is nothing revolutionary. In fact it’s probably not the best third person shooter around, if you compare it to heavy weights such as Gears of War and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. But such is the way of those amalgam games. Mass Effect is more than the sum of its parts, thanks to the storytelling parts and the character progress mechanics which complement the third person shooter parts of the game.

As previously mentioned, an RPG is a genre made up of several different games. The way to make a good RPG goes through making all these individual games good. Each little part of the RPG should ideally be good enough to be a game worth releasing by itself. If the game itself is not fun, it becomes an obstacle in the way of the story.

If there is any praise Bioware should receive for their flawed but relatively nice Mass Effect, it should be for realizing the nature of RPGs.

Let’s hope others, too, will realize this fact soon.

It’s all about the review.

Let us first accept that. That is the primary reason why people are reading games media. Sure there are also the news and the interviews and other stuff but these are merely the stones paving the path to the review. We’re out for the review here.

Naturally if something bad happens, it happens in the reviews. Reviews are the gauge of good and evil. If a certain website is good it’s because of the timely and well written reviews and vice versa.

Maybe because of the similarity between the two mediums, but more probably because video game reviewers are aspiring to become like their more respected counterparts, this whole thing is quite similar to movie reviews. Except that game reviews are a lot more confused than movie reviews.

A typical game review is a huge text that can be as long as 8 pages if the game in question had a lot of press coverage prior to release. In comparison a movie review occupies usually only one page. Why is that so? Are games really about eight times more complicated than movies for the purposes of a review?

I wish they were. I really do. But sadly that’s not the case.

The difference is in the method. Movie reviews had plenty of time to get refined. A professional movie critic like Roger Ebert usually writes a relatively short text about the movie. The text is short because he instantly gets to the point; the point being him liking or disliking the movie and his reasons for liking or disliking it. The point is this because this is essentially the information people want to obtain by reading a review. Not more, not less.

You won’t ever see Mr. Ebert writing about different devices used by the grip crew or what kind of things foley artists used to create the sound effects or what sort of lenses the DOP preferred when he shot the action scenes. That would be an in depth analysis of the movie, and it would only interest an academic or a student.

Regardless of its detail a game review is usually needlessly long. The writer gets lost in trivial and technical details giving frame rate or polygon counts. If that’s not the case you can find the reviewer writing a huge page detailing a personal memory or sharing with the reader an irrelevant anecdote meant as an introduction.

No one is interested in these things. Therefore most people don’t even read these things. They skip right to the end of the text where they can see a score, which gives them the exact information they were looking for: Is this game any good?

And apparently games are good. Unbelievably good in fact. David Jaffe is interested in this phenomenon as he could not hide his amazement at the review scores games are receiving. It appears that many games are in the top 25 percent on the ever popular percentage scale of awesomeness. In comparison only a few movies seem to have achieved the same feat so far. Naturally Jaffe asks himself if all games are really that good and if the industry really produces a few dozens of timeless classics every year…

The mystery lies in the difference between arithmetical interpretations of those scores. In short, the math is different. A game which scores over 90 is good, one that scores over 80 is average and a game over 70 is “meh”. Everything else is equal to pure garbage not worthy of anyone’s attention. As you can see, there are only 4 ratings: “Awesome”, “Average”, “Not Bad” and “Total Disaster”. However they still insist on using the percentage system. Apparently we need this kind of fine tuned scores to review games. Apparently there is someone out there who knows what exactly the difference between 90 and 91 is.

The situation is made even more complicated by several sub scores, each with their own criteria for success. Add to this fact that every single reviewer seems to have his own set of criteria for judging games — which, by the way, is the reason why Japanese Turn Based RPG games are often criticized for not having enough action — and you can easily understand why it is entirely impossible to draw a logical or at least a coherent conclusion from any game review.

“A real gamer doesn’t read reviews. Who cares about the review? Don’t read them. Just play the game and decide for yourself,” they started to say on the net.

They, whoever they are, may be right, especially considering the fact that the online revolution in gaming now allows many people to try out any game before buying it. But doesn’t that defeat the purpose of writing reviews, or for that matter, writing anything at all? If no one is supposed to read something, why are we writing it in the first place?

The solution as usual lies where the problem is. And while everyone is focused on “the how” as detailed above, I think the main problem is “the what”.

Games journalists are not really sure what it is they are writing about. This, of course, as previously mentioned, includes people who accuse turn based strategy games of not featuring enough action, which is pretty much like criticizing a horror movie for not being funny enough. But the problem is deeper than that.

People are not really sure about the definition of games.

The aforementioned Roger Ebert had to endure a lot of hate from gamers and game journalists because he said games are not art. Many people saw this as a belittlement of their favorite pastime. It is not necessarily that way. Ebert just makes a comment based on his, admittedly limited, observation of the medium. He says games are not art. Many things in life are not art. That doesn’t make them less valid or less valuable as a thing.

Ebert simply thinks games are products. The game developers’ focus is on making money, rather than producing a piece of art. He says that people who make games don’t intend to make art. Therefore games can never be pieces of art.

I disagree. But that is irrelevant. Whether he’s right or not is an entirely different issue.

The issue here is the reaction of the games media. For the first time the whole games media united against the Evil Ebert Overlord, claiming that he is a stupid old fart and reciting names of games they thought of as art. That was very sweet.

The same media however keeps on criticizing games for being expensive or short for instance. This can be. Perhaps the game is too short indeed. But have you ever seen a game being criticized for being too long?

That’s because while they are trying to review the games as art, somewhere in their minds games are still products. They see games as objects which give your x hours of entertainment for y amount of money. The higher x/y is the better the game is. Let’s face it, that’s a game reviewer’s chief concern. And precisely this is the definition of a product.

Last year 1UP said they would substract 1 whole point (10 points on the percentage scale) from Incognito’s “Warhawk”, if the game’s price was higher than $ 30. Back then the game was still unreleased. According to 1UP, a multiplayer only game which can be digitally delivered wasn’t worth anything more than $ 30. The main question here is this: Does the arguably high price make it an inferior game? When you answer “yes” to this question then you really have no right to be angry at Ebert for saying games are not art.

There is a reason why any self respecting academic work starts with a definition of its subject. That is the key to knowing what you’re doing.

I’m sure Mr. Ebert knows what he’s doing when he’s reviewing a movie. I just think it’s time for game reviewers to figure out what they want to do.

We didn’t have a recommendation for the first week of January because we were in vacation and it’s the end of the year. Here however is the game which in our opinion deserves to be called “the game of the year”. Let the trumpets blow and the drums roll.

Press Fire To Start’s Game of the Year for 2007 is…

Portal

Director: Kim Swift

Developer: Valve Software

Release Year: 2007

Engine: Source

System: PC, XBOX 360, PS3

What It Is: A demonstration of how simple game mechanics can produce an enjoyable and complex gameplay experience, without sacrificing story.

Jeanne d’Arc

Director: Ken Motomura

Developer: Level 5

Release Year: 2007

Engine: In House

System: PSP

What It Is: One of the most user friendly Strategy RPGs in recent memory. Not to mention the top notch production values.

Right now, media ethics is a very hot topic. It’s not only about video game journalism. It’s about any kind of media. People who care for this kind of stuff propose that we promote something called “Media Literacy” as a solution to all our problems.

“Literacy”, as you all probably know, is the 10 point perk which allows you to read this thing. Nowadays it’s not worth that much since many people learn it in elementary school. “Media Literacy” is different though. It’s not about merely being able to read things in the written media, but it’s more about seeing media and understanding its messages as they are. It is a sort of Brecht-like approach to our interaction with the internet, TV, movies, newspapers and similar stuff. It’s about knowing what’s happening behind the scenes and not simply looking at the shiny images we are presented and grinning like a moron. Reading the first issue of Tintin is literacy. Understanding that it is anti soviet propaganda on the silliest level of absurdness is media literacy. It’s a very nice thing.

Of course, promoting media literacy is a sort of acceptance of ultimate defeat. In a way, media literacy is a means to determine if anyone in the media violates the ethics of the job and how they do so. In a way it is accepting that the media is everything it’s claiming or trying not to be. Or maybe it’s a sad acceptance of reality instead of defeat. The goal may be stopping all the wrong things the media is doing by breeding a media literate generation of humans and rendering the aforementioned unethical practices useless. After all, what media literate person can claim Halo 3 is the video game sensation of the 21^st century. Please…

The reason for all this is the existence of ethics, specifically media ethics, the source of which is journalism ethics. People who practice journalism are called journalists. Journalism, however, is not an easy thing to practice. This is why there are universities teaching it. Rules of ethics are usually important when a certain set of people are able to wield great power. As Spiderman’s uncle said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” These schools teach the responsibility needed to do the job. And it’s important since everyone would easily say the greatest power in this century is information. Journalists are merchants of information. They earn money for carrying pieces of information to society, and during that procedure they are perfectly able to modify or manipulate the information or create it outright. People act according to the information they possess. If you can control information, you can control people. And this, as no one can argue, is a great power. Therefore some rules are needed so that people do not exploit this fact.

Journalism ethics has three basic rules. Only two of them are important for the sake of this argument. These two are: Accuracy and Objectivity. And saying video game journalism doesn’t count as journalism at this point is akin to saying oral sex does not count as sex. So don’t do that.

Accuracy is about facts. Your story has to be truthful. Ideally it should contain the answers to the questions “what, where, when, who, why and how”. You have to tell the whole story. No fact should be omitted, for doing so would disturb the accuracy of the story. It is a journalist’s job to uncover reality. Rumors are not part of reality. A journalist can of course report on the latest rumors but they should be clearly labeled that way to separate them from facts. The job of an editor is also to check the written piece for its factual accuracy. Many organizations have “fact checkers” whose job is to make sure there are no factual errors in the story.

Objectivity is about the difference between opinions and facts. A journalist’s job is bringing facts to the reader. The reader then takes these facts and forms an opinion. Ideally, a journalist should express no opinions about the facts nor write the story in a way that it influences people into forming a certain opinion. Of course, journalists are free to express opinions too, but opinions and news should clearly be separated. In fact, many newspapers maintain entirely different staffs for opinion stories and news stories. This is not enough. Editors should make sure no opinions are presented in news stories.

Partly related to objectivity is independence. The independence of a newspaper is its guarantee of objectivity and truthfulness. Therefore, advertisements should clearly be separated from the main body of the story. You cannot, for instance, change the logo of your newspaper to look like the ExxonMobile logo as an advertisement even if your stories are not biased in favor of that company, because simply doing so would create a nasty question mark in the minds of your audience. A question mark about your truthfulness and objectivity.

If you think about it even for a second, video game journalism today totally ignores these rules. You often see factual errors in news reports and reviews. More often than not, rumors are presented as actual news. News headlines almost always contain hidden opinions or cynical remarks, which to many game journalists seem like a good way of showing off their wittiness. No one seems to wonder why real journalists don’t do this kind of thing.

And how many times have you seen your favorite video gaming site totally skinned in that new AAA title’s colors with several previews describing how awesome that game is?

Sure, AAA titles from big companies attract more attention than the indie title from some unknown company, but that’s neither the journalist’s problem nor the reader’s. By giving more exposure to the bigger game, these journalists cause the death of the smaller fish in the sea and act as the right arm of the bigger companies. This might be in the best interest of the magazine or website in economical terms, but economical dependence on an outside source is hardly proof of your independence, objectivity or accuracy.

What should the journalist do if he has no other choice but violating these rules? Well… the journalist should quit his job. If all journalists do that, the firm grip of corporations over media have no choice but loosen up. Of course this happens if the journalist cares about being truthful, objective and independent in the first place, or in fact, if we are talking about journalists at all.

Because I think we are not. And this is at the heart of the problem.

You cannot really blame these people for not acting according to the ethics of journalism the same way you cannot blame a faith healer for not acting according to the tenets of the Hippocratic Vow. A faith healer can perfectly choose not to help save someone’s life just because he doesn’t like the color of his eyes. This would be a very immoral choice, but it would not be ethically incorrect simply because the faith healer is not a doctor and therefore not bound by the rules of being a doctor. He never learned the importance of those rules. He never thought about the philosophy behind the rules. Therefore you also cannot expect him to act like a doctor.

And because he is not a doctor, he cannot violate their ethics just like a coconut cannot commit murder. In the rare cases a coconut causes the death of a person we don’t call the event “a murder”. We call it “accident”.

The so called game journalists today are not really journalists. Most of them didn’t study it at all. Quite many of them have trouble writing coherent sentences in their own language.

They are not journalists. They are kids. Fans of games who have just grown up a bit and are now earning money by writing down their schoolyard conversations. They are doing okay because they know more about games than most other journalists, but that’s it. Similarly my cat knows more about being a cat than me but that doesn’t mean she should write about the subject in a magazine.

Some video game journalists stay really true to these ethical rules purely by instinct and write really well because of a thing called talent. What can I say? They should not take offense. I guess with enough cats running across enough keyboards, you’ll eventually get a good article about Halo 3 (only monkeys write Shakespeare).

What video game journalism needs most is journalists and some really serious websites or magazines which take the ethics of journalism seriously. This is the first step towards building a reliable and functional games press. We should simply thank these guys for what they did so far and find a way to replace them with proper journalists somehow.

DANIEL: You know Fasih, we’ve recently pointed out how the PC is a far superior platform to any console when it comes to first person shooters…

FASIH: We have?

DANIEL: … and so I thought that in the interest of fairness we should also mention other types of games where the two platforms see eye to eye. Like racing games.

FASIH: Right. Are you sure you…

DANIEL: I thought we could take the PC’s biggest racing franchise, Need for Speed, and compare it to…

FASIH: Burnout.

DANIEL: I was going to say to its console version…

FASIH: Nah, that wouldn’t be fun.

DANIEL: Okay. Burnout. Now in the new Need for Speed…

FASIH: Did you know that they removed the crash mode in Burnout? There is something called stunt mode instead, in which you drive around the city freely and smash into cars, jump from ramps, roll in the air, smash through billboards, and drive on the wrong side of the street very fast to reach a target score in a time limit. If you’re fast enough, you can chain these stunts together into combos, and the best thing is that you can do this cooperatively in multiplayer for maximum mayhem.

DANIEL: That sounds… pretty cool. I mean, for, uh, illegal racing, which Need for Speed no longer features. In the new ProStreet we are completely legal…

FASIH: Oh, Burnout is very legal too. You have to have a driver’s license in order to play the game. You can even put your own photo onto it. I totally endorse the usage of the driver’s license. In Burnout, whenever you commit some kind of horrible traffic crime it gets recorded on your driver’s license so that you can show it to everyone and brag about it. Did I also tell you when someone takes you out, you are practically able to send them a photo of you telling them your personal opinion about the incident in universal sign language?

DANIEL: Uh… that does sound pretty cool. But I was talking about Need for Speed: ProStreet. We’re off the streets now, racing in closed circuits…

FASIH: Ah. Now I understand. It’s professional racing. Yeah. Like Gran Turismo. Did you know Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 had 721 different cars from 80 different manifacturers racing on 51 different real life tracks? That is, if you don’t count the reverse versions of the same track. And the driving model is so realistic that Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear had almost the same time in game with a Honda NSX on Lacuna Seca as in real world. By the way, the Top Gear test track will be featured in the new Gran Turismo game along with Top Gear episodes as downloadable content. So you’re saying Need For Speed is THIS kind of game?

DANIEL: Hmm. Not really, no. I mean, we have, uhm, 55 cars, but most of them seem to be Mazdas or Nissans. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Uhm. You race in what the game calls “Race Days”, typically on airports or some such. Most of the tracks are made up.

FASIH: So it’s professional racing then?

DANIEL: Well, no, not really. There are all these kids in hip hop clothes and this constantly talking DJ who really, really likes you.

FASIH: I don’t like DJs in any game. In Burnout he tries to give you useful zen advice like: “They say speed isn’t everything… they are wrong”.

DANIEL: Well, there’s this cool, uh, AI in the announcer in Need for Speed ProStreet, where he comments on the race depending on what just happened. It almost really gives you the impression that he understands what’s happening. Like, for instance, when you’re last in the race, he will say “Where’s my man Ryan Cooper? He must be having a bad day!”, and, like, when you’re first place, he says, “There’s my man Ryan Cooper! Watch him go!” So it’s like, uh, yeah, context-sensitive. I think.

FASIH: Oh, that’s very cool. Sort of like a friend inside the game huh? Very nice. So even if you don’t have any friends, you can just talk to the announcer. Good. Burnout doesn’t have anything like that. Instead you can call your friends to your city with just one button press and they will arrive without any delay or change of interface or anything. Sometimes my friends join and I don’t realize they did until one of them lands on me with his car. It’s a sort of Burnout hug we have. So I guess… this is bad… sort of. It breaks your car. When someone lands on you, you see your roof slowly bending downwards and your windows exploding outside. It’s horrible. You have to go to the repair shop again.

DANIEL: Speaking of which, Need for Speed ProStreet now features a damage model! When you brush along the rail on the side for instance your hood cover will sometimes stand up, or the trunk will open. Also, you’re kind of going slower, and between races you have to pay money to repair the damage.

FASIH: Money? You have to pay money? This is horrible. The only money in Burnout is the money THEY have to pay because of the damage you cause. You do go to the repair shop but it repairs your car instantly even if you fly through at full speed. Which is very useful because you crash all the time, and when you crash your car sheds parts and twists in slow motion, turning into an accordion on wheels.

DANIEL: Sometimes I land on my roof.

FASIH: Yeah. But don’t worry. Crashes are part of racing. It isn’t fun if you don’t crash. And you will crash because you never feel your hand leaving the accelerate button. And when it’s not fast enough, which is almost all the time, you push the turbo button, or nitro button, or whatever it is that makes the screen shake and the the car shoot giant blue flames out of the exhaust ports and go so fast you get tears in your eyes just looking at the screen. Right?

DANIEL: Uh… right. We have that too! It’s nitrous oxide which you can, uh, inject and then the camera goes a little bit farther away from your car and I guess you go faster. In the last Need for Speed, NO2 was recharging over time. Now you have two charges and that’s that. I, uh, I guess that’s realistic. I mean, it isn’t like in Gran Turismo where nitrous usage wears out your engine, or in Burnout where I guess you still get burnout points for driving on the wrong side of the street…

FASIH: I don’t think it’s Nitro in Burnout. It’s more like mana. For the uninitiated, mana is a sort of blue liquid which allows you to throw fireballs. And appearently in Burnout it is produced by doing extremely dangerous things while driving. Like smashing through objects or launching your car into the air towards oncoming traffic and flipping it. This way your burnout meter fills up and you can go very fast for an eternity. You can even steal your opponents’ burnout bar by rubbing your car against theirs or by bumping into them, which makes them flip out of the road and crash in flames.

DANIEL: Yeah, or that. So if you want realistic nitrous, I guess you’re better off with Gran Turismo, and if you want completely unrealistic fun, I guess you should go for Burnout, but if you don’t want EITHER of those, uh, yeah. I guess that’s the general theme here, then. Need for Speed fills that gap in between absolute realism and arcade racing fun. I mean, it’s a logical thing to do, filling that gap, right?

FASIH: Hm? What? Sorry I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to complete some cooperative racing challanges with a few of my friends here. We have to jump over each other’s cars for at least 10 times in 2 minutes. Then maybe we will try the cooperative drifting challenge. I don’t know. I might just go for a marked man too, in which you have to go from one point to another in the city and evil cars are trying to take you out no matter what. Or maybe just plain PvP with some people. I really don’t know. It is hard to decide. Burnout is a horrible game.

DANIEL: That sounds… fun. Need for Speed has this… this racing mode where… where you go in a circle, and the first to finish the circle, uh, wins. Also, there’s a rhythm game called drag racing, where you have to hit a certain key to shift gear whenever your rpm is just right.

FASIH: Oh… So it’s just like Rock Band. Only without the guitar and Highway Star from Deep Purple…

DANIEL: Uh. Yeah. So… maybe racing wasn’t such a good idea. Let’s start over. Let’s talk about…

FASIH: Beat ‘em ups?

DANIEL: Uh…

FASIH: 3rd person action games?

DANIEL: Uhm…

FASIH: Survival horror?

DANIEL: Well…

FASIH: Japanese rpgs?

DANIEL: Maybe…

FASIH: Take your pick!

DANIEL: Fuck this! I’ll go play Civilization!

FASIH: Revolutions?

Mass Effect

Director: Casey Hudson

Developer: Bioware Corp.

Release Year: 2007

Engine: Unreal 3.0

System: XBOX 360

What It Is: An ambitious attempt to redefine action-rpg. One of the best sci-fi themed RPGs ever made.